Finding My Tribe

I didn't see how alone I was with cancer until I found purpose and friendships with advocacy.

BY Martha Carlson

PUBLISHED April 29, 2019

Martha lives in Illinois and was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in January 2015. She has a husband and three children, ranging in age from 12 to 18, a dog and a lizard.

Although I started writing about my experience of living with cancer soon after I was diagnosed, I didn't put "my story" together with cancer advocacy until about a year and half later. That was when I met a tremendous advocate, Katherine O'Brien from the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network. Before then, I didn't really think about advocacy as something I was doing. I wrote to share how I live with cancer and how I find hope and resilience despite loss. I thought a lot about the people who might read my words, what they might be experiencing and how others had been there too.

Katherine and I are now friends, but I've never asked her what prompted that first contact. I suppose I'd been an advocate before then, but Katherine was my first introduction to how organized advocacy can do so much to change the trajectory of metastatic cancer. I was lucky to meet Katherine when I did, in part because she supports and teaches others. That selflessness was the ideal introduction to advocacy for me and has shaped how I think about my own advocacy as furthering and amplifying everyone's hard work.

Read the full post